


We could use some tomorrows

by vaguely_concerned



Series: Scoundrels and Thieves 'verse [17]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-08
Updated: 2016-11-08
Packaged: 2018-08-29 21:48:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8506765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: The past is a foreign country; you did things differently there.





	

The battle might be over, but the work was not. They walked through the rubble that had once been an apartment block, occasionally waving away the smoke that still hung thickly in the air.

“They said they last saw the kid around here somewhere,” Jesse said, glancing around. “...it’s gonna be hard to tell with all the debris, though.”

“Yes,” Hanzo said disconsolately. His forte had always been taking lives, discreetly and efficiently - as it turned out trying to save them was much harder, not to mention more likely to leave you needing a drink at the end of the day. You failed a lot more. He had a sneaking feeling he wasn’t very good at it.

They searched for a long time, and Hanzo was uncomfortably aware of the slow wash of pinks and yellows across the sky as the sun crawled ever nearer the horizon. In the dark they would have no chance at all. It had already been four hours - he began to steel himself for having to return to her parents only to say they had found nothing.

Under the smoke was the smell of spring, incongruously sharp-sweet and joyous in this scorched out shell of a place.

“You’d have to be either really brave or really crazy to have a kid these days,” Jesse muttered after a while. “Pretty sure I’d never manage to go to sleep ever again.”

Hanzo made a sound of agreement. When he was young he had never understood the undercurrent of fear he could sometimes sense from his father;  he did now, and it had not been a particularly pleasant discovery.

 _Finally_ there was a small whimper from a gap in a nearby heap of rubble. They looked at each other.

“Over there?” Hanzo said.

“Think so.”

They crouched to peer in.

The girl was small and dark-haired, maybe four or five years old. Her brown eyes were wide and shining as she blinked at them.

“Howdy,” Jesse said weakly, giving a wave. “Uh. Hang on, I’m gettin’ you out of there. Just try to keep still.”

Jesse managed to lift the concrete slab that had trapped her in - he glanced over at Hanzo and Hanzo took over so Jesse could pull her out. He lifted her and put her down on her feet, stilted and careful as if she were a porcelain doll, then had to shoot out a hand to steady her as she stumbled. ”You... you hurt anywhere?”

She had been mostly quiet before, but now she stared up at Jesse for a second – and then  her face crumpled into tears. With a high, thin sound she fell forward to hug Jesse’s leg, latching on to him like a strangle vine. 

Jesse went completely still.

She cried, the heartbreaking sound of a child undone by fear, and she mashed her face against Jesse’s hip as the sobs shook her whole body. Jesse didn’t do anything, just stood like he’d been frozen in time as he stared down at the top of her head.

“Jesse?” Hanzo said, but he didn’t get an answer. He touched Jesse’s arm and Jesse flinched to look at him, though from his eyes Hanzo wasn’t sure he was actually seeing him. The fear shot up Hanzo’s spine - he looked Jesse over for some kind of injury but saw nothing. He tightened his hand on Jesse’s arm. “What is it?”

Jesse blinked slowly, then shook his head as he came more into focus. “Nothin’. I’m - it’s fine. We need to get her…”

He trailed off helplessly, gesturing down at the girl. There was a kind of pleading in his face and she was still crying, so Hanzo kneeled down and touched her shoulder gently. “You are safe now. Your parents will be here soon.”

He was nearly bowled over when she let go of Jesse’s leg and launched herself at him, throwing her arms around his neck and clinging to him. It was not something he had expected, but under the circumstances it seemed like the only thing to do was to go with it. He lifted her up, stiffly carrying her on his hip like he vaguely remembered doing with his younger cousins when they were little. She was disconcertingly light. The sobs subsided as she clung to him and turned her face into his shoulder. Well, that was… better. He activated the radio with his free hand.

“Dr. Ziegler, we have found her. She is…” He glanced down at her and saw no signs of injury beyond a scratch on her cheek, just a small amount of blood mingling with the dirt and the tears. “Unharmed. I think.”

Ziegler sighed. “Ah, that is excellent news. We will be with you soon.”

He heard a woman’s voice in the background give a sob of relief and the girl’s eyes widened. She said something in a language Hanzo didn’t speak - Arabic, perhaps? - but when she tentatively reached out for the earpiece he thought he got the gist of it.

“...I believe she would like to speak to her mother,” he said.

“Hm? Oh yes, of course - just lend her your radio.”

He gave her the earpiece, and she immediately started weeping again when she heard her mother’s voice on the other side, her small fingers digging rather painfully into his shoulder. Hanzo stood there awkwardly while they spoke, feeling his shirt grow damp where she was resting her face against it and watching Jesse out of the corner of his eye. Jesse held himself like he was trying to take up as little space as possible, as if he wanted to fade into the background and never come out again. When her parents finally arrived he sidled off to the side, standing far enough away that they barely noticed him as they surged forward to pick up their daughter. Hanzo handed her over to her mother, who thanked him so profusely that he felt deeply uneasy – he hadn’t done anything to deserve that kind of gratitude. It was a relief when Ziegler took over.

Over by himself Jesse spun his gun around, with the mechanical, mindless ease of muscle memory that said there was no real awareness behind it. There was still a wrongness about him, that unsettling stillness. Hanzo knew better than to try and pull him out of it now, with all these people around – but he had  questions that would need answering once they got home. For now he listened in on the small family huddling together against the creeping chill of the night, and their laughter seemed, in some small way, like its own kind of miracle.

There had been enough death.  

 

 

\-------

 

 

Once they were back in their quarters Jesse still kept quiet, moving like a newly awakened sleepwalker who didn’t quite know where he was yet. He hung his hat by the door and removed the belt, putting it down on the dresser. The clinking sound it made against the wood was loud like a shot in the silence.

Hanzo stayed by the door, watching him as he sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning his elbows on his knees. He ducked his head, shoulders drawn up and tense as if braced against some immense weight.

He didn’t say anything.

“What happened back there?” Hanzo asked eventually, walking over to stand in front of him.

For a while Jesse just stared at the floor, then he shrugged.

“I wonder how many kids like that there were over the years,” he said, almost conversationally. “I mean, it was different when it was just crates I handed over, words on a screen. It was easier to pretend I didn’t really know what they’d be used for.”

Ah.

Jesse looked at his hands.

“There were bombs,” he said quietly. “Bombs just like that one. This girl - she could’ve just as easily have died there. Luck of the draw that she didn’t.”

Hanzo reached out for Jesse’s shoulder and Jesse didn’t flinch away, but he didn’t react to it either.

“ Y’know, I... never really meant to run with the Deadlock gang, it just sorta happened. Like an accident until it wasn’t anymore. And since they barely had two brain cells to rub together between them back then they kept me around. Didn’t think there’d be anyone else who’d have me, so I stayed. And I was just,” he ran a hand over his mouth, “just some dumb kid who didn’t understand how much…”

“No,” Hanzo said. Jesse tipped his face up to glance at him and Hanzo remembered another place and another time, Jesse stumbling in through the door with bruised knuckles and a split lip and eyes right on the edge of broken. He wanted to hunt down everything in the world that could make Jesse look like that and _destroy_ it. “That was a long time ago. Everything has changed since then.”

“What damn difference does that make? It still happened.”

Hanzo glared. “If you must insist on forgiving _me_ , you can at least do me the favor of not indulging in hypocrisy.”

Jesse blinked, then laughed a raw, rusty laugh. “...well, that’s one way to frame it.”

“By your own logic the past does not preclude someone from being worthy of a future. You do not get to think yourself the sole exception to that.”

Jesse fisted his hands in Hanzo’s shirt, looking up at him with a strange dark heat, a twin of the kind you normally saw right before he shot someone he thought deserved it - but Hanzo had known him for a long time. He touched Jesse’s cheek, brushed his thumb over the corner of his mouth and Jesse’s expression unraveled painfully, falling like an empire of pretense. He put his hand over Hanzo’s and turned his face into the touch, his laugh turning into a sound like a dog that has just been beaten. He let his head fall forward to rest against Hanzo’s chest and after a while the shake in his shoulders wasn’t laughter anymore. Hanzo cradled the nape of Jesse’s neck in his hand.

“I have seen more worth in you than in any other man I have ever met,“ he said quietly.

Jesse wrapped his arms around his waist and clung to him tightly.

“Sssh.” He stroked Jesse’s hair. “Sssh, I have you.“

Hanzo held him until the sobs gave way to slow, exhausted breathing, then coaxed him to lie down on the bed - he went easily, simply letting Hanzo turn him over on his back and blinking up at him with red-rimmed eyes. His hair stuck to his sweaty forehead; Hanzo brushed it out of his face. Jesse silently reached out and twined his fingers into Hanzo’s shirt, a halting question.

Hanzo slinked up the bed and settled next to him on the pillow.

With a small sound Jesse buried his face in his chest, nestling close. Hanzo wound his arms around him, rested his cheek against the top of Jesse’s head and looked out the window, towards the vastness of the ocean, which asked no questions and held no answers.

It had never bothered him, really – it still didn’t. It was his family’s legacy, and it had been his duty to preserve it. Had he not acted as he did back then he might as well have been someone else; the very concept remained a useless hypothetical concerning a person who would never exist. And yet, with Jesse curled up against him like this, a slight tremble running through his breath...  

’The world is changing once again’.

  _Did it ever stop, Genji?_

**Author's Note:**

> If his backstory turns out to be completely different from this: uuuuh *sweats nervously* something something canon AU? Working with an open canon is so scary, I’ve never had to worry about being jossed before ha ha.
> 
> Also the fact that in the Junkenstein brawl Hanzo likens McCree to a samurai – as opposed to just a bounty hunter or mercenary – always makes me choke up a little because it means he sees him as basically honorable and that hurts me. #thiskillstheman


End file.
